Wednesday, May 14, 2014

At the crossroads of organic vs. non-organic

Weeds. Yeech! The top photo shows young Crenshaw melon plants fighting with weeds for light and nutrients. (Really, they're there, you just have to look closely!) Unfortunately, weeds (wild radish plants, in this case) germinate more quickly and grow faster than the melons. Thus the need to weed. Weeding takes time and if you have a giant corporate farm, with rows disappearing into the distance, it adds up to a lot of weeding. Which may be why conventional growers fumigate and then apply herbicides before setting in the seed. It's a real pain-in-the-ass to get rid of the little weeds by hand and UC Davis has yet to devise a machine to discriminate between the weeds and the crop. So it takes time. And time is money. WalMart won't buy your stuff if it costs too much. So, if you want on that WalMart, etc., gravy train, better go the chemical route. The compromise, of course, is that the chemicals applied turn the soil into an inert growing medium instead of living matter full of biodiversity. Worms die, beneficial microbes die. The soil becomes sterile. Personally, I don't want to eat "Roundup Ready" corn, melons or anything. And it bothers me that the oil industry is having this unwanted impact on my dinner table, for these chemical fertilizers are a by-product of the production of gasoline! And the crops they help produce come back to you mainly in the form of highly processed, over-packaged food-like substances that are adding to our nation's obesity crisis. I think it's time for all of us to take make some serious choices about food.